Panasonic HDC 60

Manual shutter-speed and iris controls; comfortable size; smarter-than-average autofocus; lens focuses relatively closely; decent battery life.

Soft video; cramped, low-resolution touch screen.

Panasonic's quartet of entry-level HD camcorders--the HDC-HS60, TM60, TM55, and SD60--delivers a nice manual feature set and good performance, as well as solid video quality for their class. As long as you don't pay list price, the SD60 is a great...

Great image quality outdoors in daylight, decent quality indoors, good white balance adjustment, autofocus and face recognition work pretty good, decent battery, full HD

Horrendous quality in dim conditions, LED isn't that bright so it doesn't help much, microphone picks up lots of background noise, auto white balance doesn't work well, always adjusting it manually